Re: proposal to fork the build-tools projects

["Paul D. Smith" <psmith at gnu dot org>]

%% Tom Tromey <tromey@redhat.com> writes:

  Tom> If you do things right, your Makefiles don't need to contain
  Tom> specific filenames at all, and you don't need to edit any
  Tom> Makefiles as you add, delete, or rename files

  tom> Long-time automake readers already know I'm strongly against this
  tom> sort of structuring.

I agree.  Explicit lists of files are the way to go.  Everywhere I've
seen globbing used it's been much more hassle than it was worth.

  tom> All implementations of make, including GNU make, are missing
  tom> features that are helpful when scaling up to larger builds.  They
  tom> are also missing features which help dependability and
  tom> reproducibility of builds.  In some cases, like using timestamps
  tom> instead of signatures, this change is impossible to implement in
  tom> make -- switching to signatures would break every Makefile that
  tom> uses a stamp file.

I would never argue that make is the world's greatest build tool, or
that there aren't many reasons to ditch it, but I don't think using
signatures is one of them.  It's quite trivial (conceptually) to provide
special targets or whatever that allow you to choose an alternative
"out-of-dateness" test than the traditional timestamp comparison.

I agree that depending on the code it might not be so trivial to
implement (in GNU make, for example, the code that determines
out-of-dateness is not quite so clean as one might hope--nevertheless
it's still quite doable I'm sure).

IMO a larger hurdle (from an implementation point of view) is moving
from make's current completely stateless existence into the kind of
stateful world required by other comparison methods such as signatures.
There are lots of "database" issues to examine there.

-- 
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 Paul D. Smith <psmith@gnu.org>          Find some GNU make tips at:
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